THE MAN NEWT GINGRICH DESCRIBED as the greatest President of the 20th century distrusted the states, was suspicious of Big Business and believed that government was the best instrument for building a morally better world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's own contract with America pledged that government would help the one-third of the nation that was "ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished."
In the Age of Newt, the Washington evoked in Alan Brinkley's masterly The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Alfred A. Knopf; 371 pages; $27.50) seems like another planet. In the late 1930s and '40s, the word liberal was...
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